By Ilene Fleischmann

Columbia University Professor of Anthropology Michael Taussig will look at emerging issues of cultural and intellectual property this afternoon as part of the University at Buffalo's Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy's two-day speaker series.

Taussig will lecture on "The Yagé Tapes: Shamanism and Intellectual Property in Colombia" from 2-4:15 p.m. today (Thursday, April 9, 2009) in 108 O'Brian Hall on UB's North (Amherst) Campus.

Taussig's lecture focuses on sound recordings taken of Santiago Mutumbajoy, a shaman who lived in the upper Amazon in Colombia. Taussig made the recordings in the 1970s and 1980s while doing fieldwork throughout the Colombian Amazon, and the recordings have recently been released as a CD.

Taussig's presentation is the second in the Theorists and Jurists lecture series presented by the Baldy Center. The series concludes with a two-day event on April 23 by Michael Herzfeld of Harvard University on "Housing Rights and Historical Wrongs: Gentrification and Neoliberalism, from the Eternal City to the City of Angels."